Lyff

Inspiration

Selina was desperately trying to get to PennApps on Friday after she disembarked her Greyhound. Alas, she had forgotten that only Bolt Bus and Megabus end their journeys directly next to the University of Pennsylvania, so she was a full 45 minute walk away from Penn Engineering. Full of hope, she approached the SEPTA stop marked on Google Maps, but was quickly rebuffed by the lack of clear markings and options for ticket acquirement. It was dark and cold, so she figured she might as well call a $5 Lyft. But when she opened the app, she was met with the face of doom: "Poor Network Connectivity". But she had five bars! If only, she despaired as she hunted for wifi, there were some way she could book that Lyft with just a phone call.

What it does

Users can call 1-888-970-LYFF, where an automated chatbot will guide them through the process of ordering a Lyft to their final destination. Users can simply look at the street name and number of the closest building to acquire their current location.

How I built it

We used the Nexmo API from Vonage to handle the voice aspect, Amazon Lex to create a chatbot and parse the speech input, Amazon Lambda to implement the internal application logic, the Lyft API for obvious reasons, and Google Maps API to sanitize the locations.

Challenges I ran into

Nexmo's code to connect the phone API to Amazon Lex was overloading the buffer, causing the bot to become unstable. We fixed this issue, submitting a pull request for Nexmo's review.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We got it to work end to end!

What I learned

How to use Amazon lambda functions, setup an EC2 instance, that API's don't always do what the documentation says they do.

What's next for Lyff

Instead of making calls in Lyft's sandbox environment, we'll try booking a real Lyft on our phone without using the Lyft app :) Just by making a call to 1-888-970-LYFF.